Arts

Science fiction often offers us cautionary tales about the role technology may play in humanity's future, but Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 isn't content to merely caution. It shrieks. It wails. It pulls out its hair, gnashes its teeth and rends its garments. It grabs us by the lapels and shakes us, screaming dire threats. It's ... unsubtle.

Men Are From From Mars, Women Are From Venus, a best-selling early-'90s relationships guidebook argued. How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a sweet, slight comic fantasy expanded from an early-aughts Neil Gaiman short story, knows the truth is far more complex: Men and Women Are from Earth, Members of an Advanced Extraterrestrial Species on a Reconnaissance Mission Here While Temporarily Wearing the Bodies of Men and Women are from.... well, we never find out where they're from, exactly. But every planet has its misfits.

In order to shoot the underwater sequences in 1989's The Abyss, director James Cameron converted a turbine pit and a containment vessel at an abandoned nuclear power plant into giant tanks, each holding millions of gallons of water. Imagine those same containment vessels with stems on the bottom and that roughly suggests the white wine budget for Book Club, a benign comedy where the pours are generous and the innuendo is crisp and full-bodied, with a slightly nutty bouquet.

Ellen Forney has a new book out, and the fact that it's about mood disorders is just gravy. Maybe that sentence needs some explaining — starting with the "mood disorders" part. If you suffer from some form of depression or bipolar disorder, you've probably noticed a divide that exists amongst books on the subject. On the one side are probing, literary accounts of what it's like to experience these illnesses — William Styron's Darkness Visible, Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind. On the other side are books about coping.

2012 was a terrible year for comic Tig Notaro. She had pneumonia, a life threatening intestinal infection, breast cancer and a double mastectomy. She also split with her girlfriend — and her mother died unexpectedly.

But since then, things have taken a turn both professionally and personally. After her stand-up set about having cancer went viral, she released the comedy special Boyish Girl Interrupted, and co-wrote and starred in the semi-autobiographical Amazon series One Mississippi. In 2015, she married actress Stephanie Allynne, and they now have twin boys.

When my mother passed away in Sarasota, Fla., my sisters and I had 48 hours to pack up her condo and book it back to our hometown of Skokie, Ill., for her funeral. Embarking on a road trip together across six states, we could only fixate on one thing: Kaufman's bagels and trays for the shiva (the Jewish tradition of seven days of mourning after burial). When it came to our mother's shiva, my sisters and I held a long-standing promise to invest in the best bagels and trays at all cost.

Towards the end of Kevin Powers' second novel, A Shout in the Ruins, a young man wandering the country in the days of the Civil War comes across a boy his own age dressed in a Confederate uniform. The stranger, in a paranoid fit of rage, slashes the boy's neck and shoots and kills his dog. The stunned boy wraps his pet's corpse in a Union blanket, and comes to a sad realization: "The simple fact was this: it was hard to find a soul left anywhere on earth who believed that there was dignity in death."

What if Bucky Dent's long fly ball in the 1978 American League East playoff game hadn't cleared the Green Monster at Fenway Park? What if John Paxson had missed the 3-pointer at the end of game 6 in the 1993 NBA Finals? What if Carli Lloyd had been injured in the final of the 2015 Women's World Cup?

Sports fans are particularly good at asking what if questions. Sports, after all, are full of counterfactual possibilities replete with drama.

When Henrietta Lacks was dying of cancer in 1951, her cells were harvested without her knowledge. They became crucial to scientific research and her story became a best-seller. Since then, Lacks has become one of the most powerful symbols for informed consent in the history of science.

On Monday, when the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., honored Lacks by installing a painting of her just inside one of its main entrances, three of Lacks' grandchildren were there.

It's 1983. Late May. An unprepossessing strip mall in Anywhere, USA. You and your friend are leaving the theater in which you have just finished watching Return of the Jedi, the (so you think, you beautiful idiot) culminating chapter of George Lucas' soaring space opera, with which you are love-drunk. You have followed it, devotedly, passionately, since the moment the lights first went down in the theater of your screening of the first film (which you did not know to call Episode IV, you gorgeous naif) six years before.

Author Michael Pollan had always been curious about psychoactive plants, but his interest skyrocketed when he heard about a research study in which people with terminal cancer were given a psychedelic called psilocybin — the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" — to help them deal with their distress.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Tom Wolfe wrote fiction and nonfiction best-sellers including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, he created a new type of journalism and coined phrases that became part of the American lexicon. Wolfe died Monday in Manhattan. He was 88.

Wolfe didn't start a novel with a character or a plot, but rather, with an idea. In 1987, wearing his signature white suit, Wolfe told me how he began his first novel, a panoramic story of New York Society:

Caveat lector: Some of the explicit sex scenes in Fuminori Nakamura's new novel Cult X will disturb you. Whether that's because they embarrass you or turn you on or both is very much beside the point. Not only does Nakamura have more disturbing things to share, those sex scenes point toward the worse-to-come events in most un-titillating ways.

Caryl Phillips' latest novel, based on the troubled life of the writer Jean Rhys, is a lush exploration of the costs of colonialism, the limited possibilities for non-conformist women, and egregious power imbalances between genders and races. Rhys' life — she was born in the British colony of Dominica in 1890 and sent to school in England at 16 — is a fitting canvas for Phillips' perennial themes of displacement, alienation and muddled identity.

Deadpool 2, like the 2016 film to which it is a sequel, stars Ryan Reynolds as a violent super-mercenary with the the ability to heal himself from any injury. In both films, Reynolds unleashes a logorrheic verbal torrent of meta-references to other movies — so many, so unceasingly, that their net effect is to hammer the fourth wall into a powdery dust.

"This thing you are looking at right now" he essentially says, often, "is like this other thing you have looked at in the past, when you were watching an entirely different film. Nutty, right?"

Jessica Jones is not your typical superhero: She's a low-rent private eye with superhuman strength and PTSD from two big traumas in her past. Krysten Ritter stars as Jessica in the Netflix series based on the Marvel Comics character — and says she loves the complex role.

"I really get to sink my teeth into it," she says. "The work that I get to do and the backstory and the character building and breaking down the scripts — I'm just so invested."

Margot Kidder, who became famous for playing Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman, has died at her home in Montana. Kidder was 69; her acting career spanned decades, from TV series in the late 1960s to seven films in the past five years.

A cause of death has not yet been publicly released for Kidder. Her death was announced by the Franzen-Davis Funeral Home in Livingston, Mont., where she resided.

"The actress and activist passed away on Sun., May 13, 2018 at her home," the funeral home said.

It's not often that a parent and child become masters of two different art forms, but an exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia proves it's possible: Renoir: Father and Sonexplores the work of 19th-century Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his 20th-century filmmaker son, Jean Renoir.

Like many fathers and sons, they had a loving, but complicated relationship. Take, for example, the fact that in 1920, the year after his father died, Jean married his father's last model.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know springtime is a traditional wedding season. But when it comes to the dresses worn by today's blushing brides, we're seeing a much less traditional trend. In fact, other people may be blushing.

When it comes to the bridal bustline, the question these days is ... how low can you go?

"How can I say this kind of politely?" Monte Durham teases. "We have dresses cut to your navel."

Not so very long ago, everyone agreed when Summer Movie Season kicked off. There was no subjectivity involved. It was dictated by the calendar: Memorial Day weekend meant the arrival of the big tentpole movies that would proceed to bust blocks over the course of the sultry summer months. Simple.